Tugging at heartstrings - until they're 'Bent'

Bent begins with a hangover and ends in a stupor. Through 11 dark and sometimes even comical scenes, we follow the misadventures of three gay men, Max (Daniel Dinero, JE '98), Rudy (Tony Melson,
PC '00), and Horst (Tom Hooven, TC '01), during the Holocaust.

It's 1934, just before the war, and we glimpse what approximates domestic comfort in Max and Rudy's tiny Berlin flat. Max, out drinking the night before, had dragged home a pretty-boy named Wolf (Ben Mazotta,
BK '98). Unfortunately, Wolf is also the lover of a Nazi official who has just been re-educated to death by Hitler. Predictably, the Secret Service (Eric Rodriguez, PC '00, and Lara Narcisi, ES '98) soon comes looking for Wolf. Just as Max is about to explain to the naif that he recalls nothing of their night of passion, the two officers burst in.

Although they manage to hide out for a few months, eventually it's off to Dachau for Rudy and Max. The audience witnesses a score of atrocities and the usual games of dominance and submission. Max falls in with Horst, a fellow homosexual, and the two become inseparable. Their dialogue fills most of the play's remaining two hours. Clearly, this isn't theater for action-lovers.

In fact, the audience gets the sense that the play is trying to bore them to insanity, trying to starve them out of their Gen-X subterranean comfort. The siege almost works. Max and Horst earn (with sexual favors) the privilege of moving rocks from one side of the stage to the other and then back again. Back and forth and back and forth. They're allowed three minute breaks every two hours. For the audience, it's trench warfare, only the Germans win. As Max says, "They're trying to make us insane." It works.

Despite lines that screech like fingernails on a chalk-board (Max: "What's love?"), Martin Sher-man's script manages to toy with the characters' sexual fetishes in unusual ways. The play makes some insightful comparisons between the SS commander's megalomania and the rough sex Max enjoys. Sherman, however, eventually becomes irritatingly didactic: Max must learn to be gentle by the end of the play. Perhaps if the play had been less talky, it would have been easier to stand its educational moments. If this kind of lesson-learning can pass for character development these days, perhaps universities ought to reinstitute a Shakespeare requirement.

Unfortunately, director Daniel Dinero seems to buy into Sherman's pedantic passion. In his program notes, he writes, "to learn from something as awful as the Holocaust, we need to confront, and confront directly." The program comes with an annotated catalogue of "background information" about the treatment of homosexuals in Germany from 1871 to 1936. Dinero even includes a "suggested reading" list. One wonders why he didn't just write an essay.

In the playwright and director's defense, it certainly is difficult to write originally about the Holocaust. It is the Holocaust, after all, the worst event in human history. There's really no lighter side of the issue, and it appears that the only artistic development on the subject possible is a gradual increase in shock value. Such a profound event, however, deserves more than a display of the grotesque. And despite its apparent potential, Bent's decision to explore the Holocaust from the point of view of an almost silent demographic group's experience doesn't add much to the conversation.

That said, this isn't a bad play. Dinero's performance, though uneven at times, is solid and convincing. Melson adds a light touch to his role that makes every scene in which he appears more believable, even if his character is slightly cartoonish. The audience even stifles a few laughs when Rudy and Max tussle in a forest outside Cologne. In what is arguably the best scene in the play, the lovers fire paranoid and almost farcical accusations back and forth, each projecting all his fears and anxieties onto his counterpart. The drama is at its most powerful when its characters are at their least dramatic, when they are least conscious of the symbols and foreshadowing of disaster.

Hooven makes the most of a difficult part. He becomes the stock victim who just doesn't give a damn any more. But his two-dimensional role can't suppress a versatile performance.

Faslyn Felicien's costumes are well done, and the sets work perfectly in Silliman's spare Attic. The cold stone floors and black walls create the discomfort necessary for the play to work.

In the end, sadly, no amount of good acting and clever designing can save this play completely. One wants to grieve, and one cannot.

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